THE. N W YORKER photographs, do you remember who you were? " Lesser asked his father. "I don't," his father said, with no apparent regret, "I do," his mother said, "I remem- ber exactly who I was, I have always remembered who I was at every minute of my life, just as if each of those minutes were this one." A S Lesser turned off Interstate 84, n. he was stopped by a policeman who stood in the middle of the road be- fore an underpass, signalling with a flashlight, Stepping on the brakes, Les- ser could feel himself beginning to panic, 'Vhat offense had he committed now? "Pull up behind the others," the policeman said, Others? Lesser saw that just beyond the underpass a num- ber of cars were parked on the shoul- der. Somewhat relieved to find there were accomplices, he turned off the ig- nition and the lights, set the emergency brake, and waited anxiously by the un- familiar highway, "'Vhat have you done?" his stepson asked. "I don't know," Lesser said. "You may proceed now, sir." A dif- ferent policeman had spoken, startling Lesser, for he had not noticed his ap- proach, The policeman's face bobbed at the window like a distressed swim- , mer s, As Lesser drove off, passing the row of parked cars, he tried to make out their still, suspicious occupants, He wanted to see what it was that had set them apart from him and his family, why he had been allowed to go while the others had been detained, What was it about him (or did it have to do, rather, with his wife or the charming presence of dogs and children) that bespoke his innocence, and what in- criminated the others whom he had left behind? Lesser had hardly been able to discern them, but they had seemed undistinguished, idle, and indifferent. 'Vhat was worse, he wondered-to be confronted with an unspecified guilt or with an innocence that was inexpli- cable? TATER that night, Lesser lay in a L strange, yielding double bed wait- ing for his wife to finish talking to her mother-Grandma-and one of her mother's old cousins, and come upstairs. The bedroom, which was, Valerie had said, where she and the two youngest of her sisters had slept together for so many years in the bed in which he was now lying, was decorated for the most part with odds and ends that Grand- ma said she had picked up for a song 1-:::P ! f I \M f ( Î J \, ,'I \1 A; \,,", , , t '<- , I ê J 'r. :-- /. :ð.. i i::. Jh :B- : .... - -\ t ..... t 33 \., ;;.:.f .), ", It:'::? "- J ...... celt may come as something of a surprise to you, but this is a stickup." . at auctions. A tinted photograph, a panorama of the front at Charleston, South Carolina, behind which an old palm frond was looped, hung next to a lithograph of a painting of the Madonna and Child by Sichel ("1844- "). A copy of the "Idylls of the King" was pinioned beneath one foot of the bureau, evidently to make it level. On the bureau top, a calendar painting depicting Christ and the effluent stain of His Sacred Heart was perched in a spray of artificial cherry buds and blos- soms, which stood, in turn, in a vase of hobnail milk glass, "I will bless every place where a picture of My Heart shall be set up and honored" was printed beside the illustration; in the lower right-hand corner was an appeal from a Father Ralph, whose mailing address was 316 North Michigan A ve- nue, Chicago 1, to pray for mission- aries in Japan and the Philippines. The room, Lesser decided, was as . inaccessible, essentially, as those in which he imagined his father compos- ing his sentimental diaries-rooms that were utterly gone, with even their space dispersed, for Lesser had situated them on the upper stories of tenements that had long since been torn down, otller buildings erected in their place. Valerie had told him that she and her sisters had all been born at home, and Lesser inferred that tl1Ìs was the natal bed, here the original room, the unap- proachable tower of the stern, disquiet- ing little girl whom he had seen in the photographs in the albums tlley had been leafing through before he had come upstairs. Lesser felt that only some inadequate part of him-one hand, swollen, feeble, and clumsy-had gained admittance to the room, was lying on its back on the bed, uncompre- hending, The rest of him was outside, His great, dazed head rested on the lawn, his body reached well across the